chronic health

The chronic health blog translates biomedical research into practical steps for functional health and longevity. It's a scientist's view on how to use diet, exercise, lifestyle choices and technology to live healthier, longer lives.

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Thursday, July 19, 2018

Today, the German media are treating us to science-gate. A story about pseudoscientific studies, predatory journals and their publishers.With the typical subliminal insinuations of an entire science community being untrustworthy.Do they have a point? Or don’t they?I believe they don’t. But I am biased. "Biased" is something I shouldn’t be as a scientist. But remaining unbiased is so damned difficult when some media hacks and talking heads rehash an old, well-known and controlled phenomenon to taint an entire profession’s credibility.Had those hacks just searched google for “predatory publishing” or “predatory journals” they could have discovered that phenomenon 8 years ago. Wikipedia has devoted an article on the matter. But claiming “investigative journalism” is a lot cooler than reading Wikipedia. And English is also not part of every German journalist’s toolbox. Otherwise, they would have discovered Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory journals and publishers. Already in 2010. Since then, the University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher keeps his list of questionable journals painstakingly up to date. No scientist who takes his research work and academic career serious will publish his manuscripts in any of those journals. Every one of my colleagues would rather not publish at all than work with any of those journals. Not as an author and not as an editor.But I also know why predatory publishing thrives. Part of the blame falls on the reputable publishers and their business model. It is insanely attractive to anyone who is after profit margins that exceed even those of Google. That’s what the media monkeys either don’t get, or don’t tell their consumers.You’ll immediately see it when you compare the science publishers’ business model to that of a regular newspaper publisher. The latter employs and (hopefully) pays its writers. The publisher also needs to employ the editors. And he has to do the selling and marketing. None of that burdens the science publisher. His authors are the ones who hand in their manuscripts. His editors are the authors’ peers who review the manuscripts, and who help improve them before these manuscripts will be published. If they get published at all. It’s called peer review. And nobody gets paid for it. Neither the authors nor the editors. How many weekends do we spend reviewing papers. Voluntarily, of course. Because the publishers flatter us about our competencies. And because we feel that we have to give back to the science community on whose members’ reviews of our own manuscripts we depend. Until this point, the science publisher has zero costs. Other than what is necessary to manage the flood of manuscripts vying to be published. And here comes the real genial part of this business model.The research work that is the subject of a manuscript has typically been paid for by some public institution. These institutions are mostly the same that finance our universities and their libraries which have to pay the subscription fees for these journals.

In other words: those who pay for the research, have to pay for the right to read the papers that describe and present the research results. No wonder the business model “scientific publishing” churns out better profits than even Google.And we scientists are doing all the work.That there is no shortage of willing authors is due to academia’s career model. Publish or perish is what describes it in three words. And mind you, getting a manuscript to be published is not a walk in the park. Even in low-impact-factor journals the majority of manuscripts received will not make it from the assistant editor’s desk though the peer review and to publishing.

That’s why we often need to submit our manuscripts to several journals. Not at the same time, mind you. Because journals frown on parallel submissions, and sanction it heavily if we dare to do it. Despite all these obstacles, publishing in predatory journals is not an option for the overwhelming majority of us. Not least because of pride. Nobody wants to refer to a paper that has been published in a journal that colleagues immediately recognize as a pseudo-journal. Only journalists don’t know that. Which bespeaks deviant journalism rather than deviant science. PrintPDF

Sunday, July 8, 2018

That's what Steven Austad, David Sinclair and Stuart Kim think.All three are Professors: Of Biology, of Genetics and of Developmental Biology respectively.Sinclair at Harvard Medical School and Kim at Stanford University.Just in case you thought I quote some nutcase science colleagues.Now, imagine, you being that person living to 150.You'd only enjoy the privilege if you could live fully functional 150 years.That's quite the opposite of how we experience aging today: a gradual loss of function.It typically leads to dementia, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, frailty, you name it.Treat that loss of function before it has deteriorated into any of those chronic diseases, and you not only prevent the diseases but you also extend your fully functional lifespan.Treatment of function means an extension of lifespan and freedom from disease.No need to be a professor to get that point.But you apparently need to be in medicine to NOT GET IT.With its refusal to acknowledge aging as a medical condition, medicine is guilty of causing bodily harm:By withholding the treatment for functional decline until this treatable condition has deteriorated into one or several incurable diseases.These diseases are not called chronic for nothing.That's why I am an advocate for treating aging like a disease.That's why our professors are big fans of two cool strategies:Strengthening the innate repair mechanisms and bio-engineering the necessary repair or replacement technologies.Back to the question whether you will make it to 150.Probably not.Because by the time these new strategies will have found their way into the clinic, you'll be dead.I am pretty sure I will be.

Initial exuberance about any new biomedical insight is rarely justified. Just check back at the decoding of the human genome.

Genomics was then hyped as THE hack for personalized disease prediction and prevention. Ten years later the sobering realization: "The numerous genetic variants that mediate disease risk … are thus meager in their predictive power. " [1].

So, don't bet on getting any lifespan extension treatments within your lifetime.UNLESS…… you start with a third strategy. It's called robustification against aging.It simply means to slow down, stop or even reverse the functional decline that comes with age.Now imagine, if we could quantify and measure your organism's robustness against all the things that can go wrong under the hood we can keep it robust.The best part is, we do not need to know the myriad of things that eventually will go wrong under the hood.Surprisingly, measuring function is something sorely neglected in medical science.That's where functionomics enters the stage.Let's take the cardiovascular system as an illustrative example.This system's failure is the cause of roughly half of all deaths (which is one reason why I have made it my priority).Its purpose is to deliver oxygen and nutrients to each and every cell of all organs.And then to carry away all the cells' waste products that come from metabolizing these nutrients and oxygen.It has a second purpose: to unburden the heart, by actively pumping the blood through its conduits (the arteries).The cardiovascular system does its job as a purely hydraulic system. Therefore cardiovascular function can be fully described by the same physical parameters that engineers use to build hydraulic systems.The tool to describe and quantify the cardiovascular hydraulics is cardiovascularfunctionomics.It's a profile of all the functional parameters that together determine your system's functional capacity. Much like your genomic profile determines your inheritance.Translate that functionomic profile into a correction factor of your calendar age, and we have two vital things.First, we know how robust you are against threats to this system.Second, we have a benchmark that can tell us how good we are in robustifying you, say, with a drug or exercise or diet.We do not need to know what exactly it is that might be threatening YOUR system, as long as we know that YOU are robust enough to withstand anything that CAN happen.What is the net effect of 'robustification the functionomics way'?It buys you time.It may be only a couple of years, say, a decade.But 10 years of staying functionally fit may make a sizable difference, between on the one hand living long enough and in good enough health to benefit from future technologies of rejuvenation, and on the other hand missing that boat.Because, even if our professors' exuberance may be a bit overboard, we are pretty close to some exciting new life and health extension technologies. And if it wasn't for medicine, we would be much further ahead on that path by now.That's why I conceived of functionomics.It may make you, and me, the first ones to make it to a healthy 150 after all.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Much of what medical science offers, be it a drug, a treatment or some advice about supplements or diets, will probably not work for you and possibly do you some harm. If I was the only one telling you this, you could be forgiven for just waving me off. But if a Stanford professor of medicine, health research and statistics tell you "Why most published research findings are false" you may want to listen …PrintPDF